The new Impreza is better than the old one, but where’s the funk and fun?

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Ride and Handling

Handling
The Impreza’s ride is very comfortable, especially for a car in the sub-20 grand class. In our daily commute, it was a relaxed partner. On twisty roads however, the suspension gets discombobulated. On one hand there’s a surprising amount of grip, and because of the all-wheel drive you can carry quite a bit of speed to a corner. But the soft springs mean lots of body roll, and the lack of power means that carrying the speed out of the corner doesn’t really happen. It’s kind of fun in a drive-a-slow-car-fast sort of way, but any tossability the Impreza once had has been, well, tossed.

Fun to Drive
The handling is partly there, but the lack of power (or presence of weight) hinders what you can do with the car. Shorter gearing would help, as would a stiffer suspension. Of course, if you’re looking for all that, you might just want to step up to the more powerful and stiffly sprung WRX. Unfortunately, you’ll have to shell out an additional seven grand to get there, and there is currently no stiffly sprung naturally aspirated model available, and nobody at Subaru is mentioning a 2.5 RS version any time soon.